Flood Recovery Update: Mylar Drawings

We’re pleased to report that one of our flood recovery workflows wrapped up on Friday: the architectural drawings on Mylar. Many thanks to our hard-working student employees, who were largely responsible for keeping this project moving. The drawings range in size from 8 1/2 x 11″ up to 36 x 80″, with the majority of the drawings falling into a middle range of about 26 x 38″.

Hope washing an architectural drawing on Mylar.

The drawings were submerged, one-by-one, in a bath of warm, deionized water, gently wiped with a soft sponge, and then hung to dry on clotheslines strung up around the lab.

After the drawings had been washed and dried, the students then sorted them into stacks according to the building represented, in order to make more detailed sorting easier for our colleagues at FPM when the documents are returned. As soon as the drawings have been returned to FPM, we will be able to reclaim a significant portion of the Conservation Lab’s workspace for other projects.

Stacks of Mylar architectural drawings taking over the lab's workspace.

In total, our student crew washed 612 drawings on Mylar in approximately 75 work hours, which averages out to slightly more than 7 minutes per drawing.